In Defense of the Filibuster

Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence. The law will not bend to the uncertain wishes, imaginations, and wanton tempers of men. The law no passion can disturb. Welcome to Stubborn Things, a podcast about American politics where we chase the facts wherever they lead. I'm your host, Sean Trendy. And I'm Jay Kost. And today we'll be talking about the filibuster. Hey, nothing controversial at all about the filibuster these days. Not at all. So the filibuster, obviously the big thing is the current debate over whether to repeal it. And I think whether you think you should repeal it or whether it's foundational to democracy is often dependent on whether or not your party controls the Senate and is frustrated by it. Jay and I are both defenders of the filibuster. But before we get to that, I think we need to spend some time talking about how the filibuster came to be, because one of the arguments that people make against the filibuster is it's extra constitutional. It's not something required by the Constitution. I do think it's important that that is true. That doesn't mean that it doesn't have utility or that we should get rid of it because the Constitution does provide that each body of Congress gets to create its own rules. But it is a unique rule, but it is just a rule, not something from the Constitution, not part of Madison's vision. So what do you think, Jay? Like, why did we end up with this thing? Yeah, that's a good question. So I would kind of suggest that when you're thinking about that filibuster and you're thinking about, oh, well, that's not in the Constitution. There's a lot of stuff that's not in the Constitution. For instance, the Constitution doesn't say anything about whether or not the president can fire somebody. It's just silent on that. And in the first Congress, there was a real debate about that. And the argument that won out was the president can fire the secretary of state. And the reason that that argument won out was because that it was implied by the nature of executive power. If the president's duty under the Constitution is to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, then he has to be able to fire people who are his subordinates that he thinks are doing a bad job. So I would suggest then that when we think about the filibuster, we move away from the constitutional aspects. They're the direct constitutional question about the filibuster. And we consider the filibuster more in from a constitutional perspective, more in light of at its best, what does it do? And at its best, What the filibuster is, is a consensus forming rule in the Senate. And it's a rule in the Senate, which was supposed to be the body that could best produce a national consensus because of the nature of senators themselves. And so from that perspective, I think, is the best argument for the filibuster. Now, I think one of the things when we think about the filibuster, we have to put it in the context of pretty much all of our political institutions, is that it doesn't function properly. The filibuster is not doing like we can you and I can make a case for the filibuster and a critic can look at it and say, well, is the filibuster really doing that? And I think the answer in many cases is no, it's not. However, that doesn't mean that we should get rid of it. I actually think the filibuster is one of the things that's holding up our very creaky and unstable, increasingly unstable dam, preventing a flood of either left-wing radicalism or right-wing radicalism policies from just overwhelming the country. So I'm very much in favor of the filibuster from that perspective. I think when we're thinking about it, though, we have to consider, like, why does the filibuster exist? And will you contrast it with the House of Representatives? The House of Representatives debate in the House is structured. You cannot talk as a House member. You cannot just get up and talk on any given issue at any given moment. That's not how it works. House debates and House votes are structured by rules that are created by the Rules Committee. The Senate has no rules committee. The historical precedent in the Senate up until the 20th century was senators talked until they were done talking. And when everybody was done talking, that was when you began to vote. That was how it worked. So there was a filibuster that existed not in the rules, but really just in the absences of the rules. So like, for instance, you could go back to like 1889, 1890 and see Southern Democrats filibustering basically a protein version of the Voting Rights Act because they just talked. It's not until World War One where the filibuster, this sort of talking thing runs face first into the new presidential governance model that Woodrow Wilson is really embodying. Senate Republicans did not want to get the United States involved in World War I. And so what they start doing is they start talking to delay measures that Wilson thinks are necessary for American military preparedness. So Wilson puts pressure on Senate Democrats to limit debate in the Senate by creating the cloture rule. So the idea here is that if 67 senators want to end debate, they can end debate. So it's really not until about 100 years ago that the modern filibuster comes into existence. Before that, you could just talk. Yeah, I think it's important in that there's a lot of good stuff to unpack in there. Even going back to its inception, the critics are right that it was an accident. Aaron Burr sits down. He wants to remake the rules of the Senate. And Aaron Burr, say what you will about him. He was brilliant. Like he is ahead of his time on things like slavery and women's rights. There's a lot of downsides, but he had his virtues and he sits down to redo the rules of the Senate and he forgets to put into the rules something to shut off debate. It's just missing and it gets picked up on later. But it's not a big deal, because like you said, the Senate is very collegial. It's a small body when we only have 13 states or 15 or 17. And so stuff still gets done. But as the country grows, as the federal government gets increasing jurisdiction, there's more things that it does regulating the economy. The filibuster becomes an impediment because people just say we're not going to stop talking. So, yeah, you're right. The cloture vote, the way to shut off debate gets put in 1917. But it's originally two thirds of the body. There's two things. It's two thirds of the body. But you have to actually talk. There's a price to filibustering. And I think this gets important when we kind of talk what you were alluding to, that the filibuster, maybe we don't get rid of it, but it's not really functioning the way it's supposed to function. So the filibuster also gets kind of a bad rap because it was used, and I don't mean to diminish this, always against civil rights legislation, anti-wrenching bills, Voting Rights Act. But it gets used against a lot of other things. Sometimes it gets put up as if it's only a civil rights thing. It's not. Well, I think we could also acknowledge, too, that this filibuster is designed to protect minority rights in the face of a majoritarian government. And the fact that some minorities are politically indefensible today doesn't obviate the need for the protection of minority rights. Yeah. And that's something when well, so just real briefly to make sure our listeners understand after the filibusters of the Civil Rights Act, The progressives are very liberals, as they become known, are very much against the filibuster, even though it was used on a wide array of policies. But 1974, there's a huge influx of young, progressive, liberal, very, very liberal members of Congress, you know, 1958, 1964, 1974. And sort of the compromise that gets struck is so we're going to lower the cloture threshold to 60. 60. It goes from 60, 70 to 60. From two thirds to three fifths. Exactly. But the deal is you can just kind of say I filibuster. Right. It's understood that you can filibuster it by amendments, by just keep you keep adding amendments to a bill. We never have to vote on the actual bill. And that is really there's no cost to a filibuster at that point. And I went back because I'm a nerd and I checked and there have been two pieces of legislation since then that have passed with fewer than 60 votes. One was and I don't know why they did, but one was Clinton's AmeriCorps program and another was some budgetary related bill, like an appropriations bill or something. Other than that, everything passes. So everything is kind of considered filibusterable. Mitch McConnell in 2010 gets the idea that Democrats have a filibuster proof majority. Obama's not popular. They have some very, very vulnerable senators with Ben Nelson from Nebraska, Mary Landrieu from Louisiana. So he gets this idea, we're just going to do a cloture vote on everything. That way, to get things done, Ben Nelson is going to have to cast vote after vote after vote with the Obama administration, can no longer claim I'm a different kind of Democrat. And so I think there's agreement between us that that needs to end. But at what cost if we end the whole thing? because, you know, America, well, we can talk about the comparisons to Europe later, but I completely agree that one of the virtues of the filibuster is that it does require some type of consensus. And part of the issue is that it's too easy to filibuster. Part of the issue is just that we've become so polarized that people have given up on consensus. And that's tough. Yeah, my position is that, and I alluded to this a moment ago, I think the filibuster doesn't look good now, but that doesn't mean it's a source of the problem. I think it's a reflection or manifestation of the problem. And I think I have a couple thoughts on this because I wrote an article like 14 years ago, no, maybe like 12 years ago with Randy Barnett of Georgetown. We wrote an article for the Weekly Standard, May it Rest in Peace, defending the filibuster and calling for reform of the filibuster. So one of the things we talked about was, you know, we should keep the filibuster except for appropriations bills because they're essential to government functioning. And I still agree with that. I still think the filibuster needs to be reformed, but I think that there's a deeper issue, which is that the institution of the Senate has like fundamentally transformed and probably in ways we don't like. I'll give you a few. So some of this, I think, goes back to the 17th Amendment and the direct election of senators. I think that's part of it. I think part of it is also hyperpolarization. But I think hyperpolarization is also downstream of the primary system now, which tends to favor ideologically extreme constituents on both the left and the right end up sort of morphing politics. And I think that this is all contributed to a distortion in the Senate of like what the Senate is supposed to do and what the Senate is supposed to be. Senate was originally the place where deals get made. The idea behind the House is that the House reflects the immediate, potentially temporary, often not really thought out kind of considerations of the people. And the House will vote for something or demand something that goes up into the Senate. Senators have a few advantages. They're indirectly elected. They're still chosen by state legislature. So the Republican small Republican sort of function here they still accountable to the people And they also they have longer terms So the idea is is that the Senate we often think about the Senate you know I think Washington or somebody from the founding said it was like the saucer under the teacup which is true But it also the case that the Senate becomes the place where negotiations, big time negotiations happen. And to some extent it still is. But I think what's also happened here is that the Senate senators no longer have that freedom for bargaining that they used to have. And I think your example of Ben Nelson is a good one, because the idea here is that we were just going to make it really hard for Nelson. We are going to constrict your space to bargain because Nelson is directly elected or accountable to the people. And so he kind of becomes like just a big House member in some respects. That also, think about McConnell's strategy there too. We are going to use voting in the Senate to send a political message. Voting becomes downstream of the permanent campaign. That is not the way the Senate was originally intended to function. And so what happens then is you get a Senate where senators are less inclined to bargain and negotiate and to temper the kind of maximist views of both the left and the right and to find some sort of consensus. And I think, you know, this is also it gets back to this idea of if you ever go and watch the Senate on C-SPAN 2, you're not going to see any conversation, really meaningful conversation. You're not going to see senators giving meaningful speeches about the nature of public policy or what this moment demands of the people, you're going to see senators giving campaign style speeches because the Senate has been reduced to a platform for the permanent campaign. And in this context, the filibuster and its design of creating and forcing senators to find mutually compatible compromises is not working properly, but it's not working because Senators don't want to find that. They just they just don't. Yeah. And I think the point maybe we should do a podcast on the primaries. Yeah, I think there's two things. First, for readers, again, since we're new in the show, I think Jay and I both agree, you know, that there's no such thing as a free lunch. And so you can have a reform like I think the direct election of senators was necessary because Senate seats were going unfilled. It was corrupt. People were being bought off. But that doesn't mean there aren't second and third order effects that are negative. And I agree that this you pay a price for this increased responsiveness to the electorate. It's part of why I think the filibuster is important, because when the Constitution came into being, there were a lot of checks that were put in place on the ability of the federal government to sort of take over everything to become the most important body. body. And those have been eroded over time. Some of them, I think, needed to be. Some of it has just been the way that the country just developed. But those checks are still important. And with federalism being kind of on life support, we have direct election of senators, all manner of things. I think the filibuster is one of the last sort of Madisonian checks that's sitting around out there. One thing I think this leads into is kind of you do have to take seriously, I think, the criticisms that have been levied against the filibuster. So I think we need to spend a little bit of time talking about those. And I just kind of jotted down four, but maybe we'll come up with more. But the first argument, and this really doesn't do that much for me, is that the filibuster actually causes cynicism because nothing gets done. First, I'm not sure I agree with that premise. I don't know if I lived through the same pandemic as everyone else lived through. But like we got a vaccine done in 10 months for a novel virus. We got trillions of dollars injected into the economy during the financial crisis. Like TARP, not so great, but like TARP got passed. You know, failed the first time, but it got through. We still do have this ability to get big things done. And what I see is that the biggest, loudest critics of the filibuster are partisans on both sides. 100 percent, you know, and it's not that, you know, there's this kind of thing that goes in hand with it is that you force the executive to act by not allowing Congress to act. That was one of the arguments, actually, when Obama used the executive power to basically do immigration reform on his own. Well, Congress doesn't act, so he didn't. And it's like, no, he didn't. Yeah, he rewrote immigration because Congress, his justification was Congress wouldn't do it. Yeah. And it's like, no, Congress wouldn't do it because it responds directly to the voters. And the Republican primary electorate had been very clear they don't want this. And so Republicans stood in the way. The takeaway from that is not that Obama needed to do it alone or the executive needed to act alone. It's that there isn't consensus to get it done. That's right. I think that that sort of relates to this idea, too, of the filibuster worsening polarization, which is a common criticism because votes are free. I don't know. Like I said, I sort of get back to this idea that the Senate is just like you look at the filibuster and you look at the problems of the filibuster. It's almost like looking at the iceberg from the perspective of the Titanic. All we're really seeing is what's above the water. We're not seeing like what's underneath the water. I'll give you an example of what I mean here. You know, there is a criticism. It's been leveled, I think, particularly with respect to the SAVE Act. conservative Republicans are demanding that leader Thune do a talking filibuster to undo the save act. Okay. So, and Thune doesn't want to do this. One of his reasons for not wanting to do this is because the idea behind a talking filibuster is that if you can't get to 60 votes to shut down debate, you can, you can shut down debate in another way. It works like this is that in a legislative day, which is just from the beginning of the day until the Senate gavels out a session. So it could be more than one day. Every senator is allowed to talk for as long as they want on two subjects. So there's I think there's like 45 votes opposed to the Save Act. So conservatives like Mike Lee are saying, ah, what we need to do is we need to force these 45 senators to come out and talk until they can't talk anymore. And after each of them has done that twice, we can have a vote. Okay. So, but here's the thing. Okay. The flip side of that is that the minority can just suggest the absence of a quorum. So the majority party can't just be like, yeah, you guys talk, we're going to go home. We're going to, or we're going off to vacation in Cancun. You guys have to hold the floor. No, no, no. The majority has to like camp out in the, around the Senate. And so it used to be that this was a doable thing because senators were just, that's all they did. They were senators. They were there. It happened. They didn't even bring their families to Washington for the most part. They stayed in boarding houses. So all of this could happen. This is not something that United States senators want to do now. Like if you like I did, I did a quick look at like the age distribution. Okay. We have one senator in their nineties. We have like five in their eighties. And then we got like two dozen in their seventies. are these people really physically able to do the talking filibuster? And it's not just the minority that has to talk. Are you going to keep like, you know, 75 year old John Booseman just has to camp out somewhere? Is this what we're doing? No. And it's part of this general shift in the nature of the Senate and what senators do, where frankly, the amount of time and effort they spend senating, for lack of a better term, gets way reduced, way reduced. And senators less and less are involved in the drudgery of legislative business because they have aides to do that. And also they travel because they're part of the permanent campaign. And so really, they're just kind of it's increasingly a peacocking style job. So you just don't have a Senate that is capable of doing a talking filibus, even putting aside, like even if you reject Thune's argument that like we can't take six months off of our legislative business to force a vote on the SAVE Act. The reality is, is that if you go through and look at Thune's caucus, he can't ask these people to do they physically incapable of doing it. And it's part of a jet. So my point is, is that a lot of these problems that we have with the Senate are actually downstream of a lot of the or I should say the problems that we identify with the filibuster are actually downstream of the reality that the Senate just sucks. It's a crappy institution that used to be amazing. And now it just sucks. Well, we are going to rehash the the brilliant Jay rant from last time. If you want to listen to one of Jay's best all time tirades, I urge you to load up the last episode of Stubborn Things. It's a doozy. It's worth your time. I was in tears, but I think you're right. Like this idea of polarization being worse because it was like, no, no, the Democratic senators are still going to be responsive to a very progressive liberal primary electorate. And that's still going to be driving the bus on what they have to do, because worrying about the general isn't as much of a thing anymore, even in the Senate, where you just don't really win outside of D plus one or R plus one states. That's right. Like if you look at Schumer, for instance, who Schumer worried about? Is he worried about the Republicans in New York? No, he's worried about AOC. Yeah. And say, I mean, look at look at Fetterman. Fetterman is from an actual swing state. He's taken a couple of uncomfortable ideologically positions and he's cooked. He's got like a 35 percent job approval among Democrats. So it's still going to be the polarization driving the bus. I do want to spend some time on probably my least favorite argument for the filibuster, which is like, look at states and look at other countries that don't have the filibuster. They do just fine. And this gets to a bigger pet peeve of mine, which is people just don't understand the nature of America. America is not America is a giant, diverse, transcontinental empire. And Americans aren't comfortable thinking of themselves that way. But but they are. The analogy for America is not France or Germany or Spain. The analogy for America is Europe. Yep. Like, how do you get Spain and France and Slovakia and Slovenia and Ukraine to hold together? I mean, it's a nightmare trying to do that. And America is a nightmare. So it's true that in these smaller kind of more, frankly, similar countries, some of which have 2000 year histories that this kind of works. The other thing is that a lot of these countries have parliamentary systems and in parliamentary systems, you know, there's like seven or eight parties competing for power. So the break, although we talk about parliamentary, meaning that the parties get their agendas through, that's not necessarily true because they typically have to form coalitions with other parties. And that's what acts as a break on the majority in parliamentary systems in that there rarely is a legislative majority for one party or another. It's a coalition of minorities that gets things done. And that's kind of what the filibuster imposes on our single member district first past the post system is that we're not going to just let a party that wins 50.5% of the vote do whatever it wants. It needs to reach out and it can just do whatever you know rural Texas wants or whatever New York City and L want Like it has to to appeal to a diversity of interest It's what gets at Madison's idea that to make this country hold together and not descend into tyranny, you have to increase the sphere and reach out to different factions to compromise and get things done. Absolutely. So I think to put a bow on this segment, this is how I would frame the filibuster, is that an underlying consistent malady of our political system is the outsized influence of ideologically extreme factions within our polity and that their primary mechanism of control is the primary. And I would add to that related the nature of our campaign finance laws, which privilege small dollar donors. So you get this almost kind of bourgeois radicalism on both the left and the right, I would argue. And I think that this has really distorted the political incentives of our leaders. And the House of Representatives really reflects this. And the Senate increasingly is reflecting it, where the idea here is not so much compromise, consensus, debate, realizing we can't get our way and thus we have to find something that we can all live with. But it's sort of a Hobbesian nightmare of everybody versus everybody. And if you have a narrow majority, you just shove it down the opposition's throat. The Senate remains the major impediment to that. The Senate predominantly by virtue of the filibuster. So if you would like the United States of America to continue on this path of quote unquote democracy, but is really just ideologically polarized minority factions dominating politics and getting whatever they want, you should get rid of the filibuster. If that is something you want, if your goal is to get a total triumph of your side over the other side, you should absolutely be in favor of getting the filibuster. However, if your view is that, you know what, we're all stuck in this country together, there's 330 million of us, we have to find some way to live with one another, and maybe we need to compromise a little bit, then the filibuster, for as problematic as it is, is one of the few institutions that is still forcing the two sides to do that. And the reason it seems so dysfunctional is because it is like the one of the final bulwarks preventing this sort of partisanized, ideologically extreme, pseudo democratic logic of, you know, we won the majority so we get everything we want, when in fact, it's really just your ideologically extreme people driving the coalitional bus. That's my view. So like the filibuster is a problem, but like it's a problem because it's one of the last things that's a throwback to an era where, you know, the two sides I know is going to be sound crazy, but the two sides actually talk to each other and found some common ground. Yeah. I'm going to take two seconds and then introduce our second segment. But just because I think this is important and this is a big, rich debate that's going on right now. I agree with the idea that elections should have consequences and the idea that we are responsive to the people. But I think people who are filibuster advocates are just like, well, if they don't like what the other party is doing, they elect the opposite party and they can just throw it out. And that's just not how America was ever intended to work. And most people, I think if you're a wonk who pays attention and like can recite, oh, this is what happened on House vote 204 or this is the difference between Obamacare or this is, you know, knows all the fine arguments for the Obamacare individual mandate. This makes sense. But that's not how most people are. Most people just see right now they see dysfunction in Washington. They'll see dysfunction in Washington plus destabilization. Oh, this year I had 20 days of early voting. Now I don't have any. Now I have 20 days of early voting again. That's just not going to work in America. And it is it's a disaster in the making. Totally agree. I do want to introduce our by the way, if you don't like what we're saying or if you do like what we're saying, tag us on Twitter, tag us on the A.E.I. podcast. Send us emails. Even better. Yell about us to your friends that they give a listen. Yeah, we would love that. Tell us how terrible we are. We would love to get dragged. Our second block is one that I never would have anticipated talking about a year ago, which is Mike Johnson is actually kind of a good speaker. Yeah, he's kind of not terrible, which is a change for Republicans. Yeah, like ever since John Boehner left, it's been just kind of this comedy of errors on the Republican side. And somehow Mike Johnson, this this soft spoken backbench Republican, has pulled it together and like he's getting it done. what do you think i mean i think to be sure there have i think the new york times ran a a piece about him suggesting that women were unhappy because they didn't feel like they had appropriate role in the in the speaker's power structure i i don't know about that i just want to acknowledge that that that criticism is out there but yeah johnson is a weird interesting guy in a in a and i mean that in a good way so my view is that When you look at the history of Republican congressional politics, it has been very fractious for a very long time. John Boehner's fall is really illustrative of what I think is the underlying dynamic, which is that John Boehner predated Obama. And there was a general view among voters in 2010, I think, that and just Republican voters ever since, that the old guard establishment Republican Party is not to be trusted. They've sold us down the river too many times, blah, blah, blah. You know, listeners know the standard spiel. Without commenting on its merits, the political dynamic was that these voters would, primary voters particularly, here we go again, would elect members of Congress who would go in and were like, I'm going to be against the established Republican Party. And that created a lot of problems for the leadership because the way leadership works is you have to build seniority over time. and it ended up being Boehner's downfall. But I also think it was probably it was contributed both to the downfall of both Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy, because they both were in Congress before Obama. They were there during the Bush years now. And the trick, too, about this is that McCarthy and Ryan were part of the so-called young guns. Like in the early 2000s, they were young, like early 40s members of Congress with a new way of looking at things. And the thing about them is, is that there were three young guns. There was McCarthy, there was Paul Ryan. And then the third one was Eric. What's his name? Cantor. Eric Cantor. And even though these guys were like solid conservatives from like a 2004 perspective, after the tea party, they were all sus, as my kids like to say. They were sus. And so sure enough, Cantor gets primary down. Ryan has the speakership basically fall apart on him, although he managed, he leaves. And the same thing with McCarthy. And, and what I think that makes Johnson successful is that Trump is a manifestation of this outsider energy within the Republican party, but he's also kind of weirdly an establishment figure. I mean, just his disposition is he likes to do deals. So the question was always whether or not somebody could get in line with Trump and his ability to reflect the energy of the outsiders, but also so impose like order. And ironically, it's Mike Johnson is the one who's managed to do this. And it might be because he doesn't predate ARP, which I think might be the critical factor here. Yeah, I think that's part of it. And I think part of it, too, you know, political scientists don't like to talk about things that can't be reduced to ones and zeros anymore. This is one of our big beefs with the discipline as you go back and you read VO Key and it's brilliant and it's still timely. It was written like 70 years ago, but you still learn about the modern South from him. Not a regression analysis to be found in it. And again, I have a master's degree in statistics. Like I'm not like get off my yard with your new, you know, your sociological gobbledygook as Chief Justice Roberts called it. But there are intangibles that are important and leadership is important and individuals are important. I think one thing Johnson has going for him is first, he is conservative like no one doubts his conservative bona fides but second he just seems like a chill guy yeah like you know he he's not someone that's going to come in guns a blazing and tell you you freedom caucus people are destroying the country like i get i get the sense from me someone's just going to sit and listen to you and be like okay i see your point of view and that's important in leadership you know paul ryan got selected because he was like the darling of the sort of libertarian right. And he was the lost cause of the 2012 election that Republicans still he was like Republicans still can't believe they lost that election. That doesn't make you a good speaker. And in fact, in a lot of ways, it can make you a bad speaker. You know, Paul Ryan is a genius. I liked him as a as a member of Congress and as a ways and means chair. But those skills of understanding the details of policy aren't what a speaker needs. The speaker needs to understand his caucus and he needs to understand the institution and he needs to have the right disposition. I mean, heck, with Johnson, like regular orders back. What? Yeah, regular orders back. They got all of their appropriations bills passed. It's remarkable. I mean, I don't even know when when does that happen? Like 20 years or something like that. It's ridiculous. I do think like one of Ryan's problems was that Ryan. So for Ryan being like a like a stalwart conservative for Ryan. I feel like was one of the crucial aspects of that was we are going to take seriously our entitlement crisis. And we're going to acknowledge that dependency upon the state has gotten out of control, not just in terms of its budgetary impact, but all of the distortions that it's having underneath. And we need to change our social welfare policy from basically a defined benefit to a defined contribution. this was conservative orthodoxy in the year of our lord 2010 in the year of our lord 2017 forget it donald trump wins a nomination saying i'm not touching social security i'm not touching medicare and and he wins the he wins the nomination in a walk and he wins the presidency and so you have a guy like ryan who's speaker in his entire sort of bona fides of sort of entitlement reform are now thrown out the window. And that's going to create, I think that's a huge aspect of this in at all. So one of the things about Johnson is that as speaker, he has the confidence of the president in a way that I don't, Paul Ryan, I don't think ever did. Like even when Ryan was on team Trump, it was obvious that the two of them would rather not be dealing with each other. And McCarthy, a lot of people felt like McCarthy's conversion to Trumpism was kind of late in coming and a little cynical. I can't comment on that, but I know that people thought that. And I think that's one of Johnson's great strengths is that he has the confidence of the president in this age of presidential governance. You know, it's one of the things that like, if Johnson's taking you aside and saying, listen, I need you to do this for us, you know johnson's talking to trump so they're they're he's operating under the like johnson's sort of a capo in the family in the family business with with trump being the godfather it a huge advantage that he has that ryan simply didn have and i don think mccarthy did either yeah you know and it interesting but we could turn this into a two segment just on the speakership But you know you think back to even Newt Gingrich great idea guy Like, he had ideas all over. He signed homework to the incoming members of the 104th Congress. Like, you need to read The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler. Yeah. And then it just fell apart. Like he drove the ship into a rock and then he was ousted four years, three years later. There's actually a coup attempt during his first speakership term. Parties need ideas, guys. They need ideas, guys. They need brawlers. But then they need politicians, people who understand politics, who understand leadership, who understand bringing people together. And Johnson does not seem like an ideas guy to me. I've never heard him give a speech where I'm like, huh, you know, I never thought of that. Yeah. And Ryan would give speeches like that all the time. Yes. Yeah. Johnson isn't a street fighter. And I think that's that's a key, too, is that, yeah, the House Freedom Caucus would love a street fighter, but that wouldn't be good for the party. Like then you would lose all the House seats up to like our, you know, Trump plus six or whatever. But Johnson seems to be someone who understands the needs of the very coalition pieces of the Republican coalition. And again, that's leadership. And I think our listeners on both sides, frankly, need to understand those kind of different silos when it comes to figuring out who they want their nominees to be, who they want running their institutions, because the bomb throwers and the idea guys and Newt was kind of a combination of both. They just don't do well. Yeah, I think another thing that ended up being a problem for Newt, and I think it's created a mantle that is too heavy for most speakers, is that Newt was also really the first speaker who becomes a national political leader, celebrity, right? Newt's on like the cover of Time magazine. He is seen as the opposition to Bill Clinton. Like I remember Barone in the in the 96 Almanac of American politics talks about the return of constitutional government, sort of like Congress reasserting itself and Gingrich sort of acting like a prime minister. that is a very heavy burden for a speaker to do on top of everything you already mentioned. And it was too much, I think, ultimately for Newt. I think it was probably too much for both McCarthy and Ryan, because when you're that big a guy, you end up making enemies. And really, I think the only person who has managed to fit comfortably in that role successfully is Nancy Pelosi. I think she's the only speaker who has done a really good job of acting as a Sherpa for her party for channeling the ambitions of the president into actual like real legislative results and functioning as a leader in the national conversation. And one of the things that I think really Johnson has done a good job of is not he's not even trying to do that. And so in that respect, you know, I mean, given Denny Hastert's personal issues, this might not seem like a very good comparison. But institutionally, I feel like Johnson is sort of like doing a similar thing that Denny Hastert did was I'll figure it like the president kind of identifies the goal and I'll figure out the path to get there. I'll appear on the Sunday shows, but I'm not a national political leader. Like that was always an interesting thing about Pelosi because Pelosi was speaker before Obama. Obama was kind of a greenhorn. Obama wasn't really interested in the policy details. He kind of wanted to float above the fray. And so like Nancy Pelosi kind of operated as like his first minister and did so successfully. And that is just not a job that is an easy job. And I think that Johnson doesn't even want to try and do that job. Danny Haster. Now, there's a deep cut. I'd actually forgotten he was speaker. Maybe like that's to your point about Johnson is that people remember Newt. You know, they'll probably remember, I completely forgot Denny Hastert, but that's not necessarily a bad thing for a speaker. You know, I was going, I actually taught Congress in my class I teach at Ohio State this week. And one of the things I said, I pointed out is that there's no analogy to the speaker on the Senate side, right? But the speaker is a constitutionally mandated position that the House elects. And then you have the majority minority leader and the majority minority whip. Like, in theory, the speaker does exactly what the title suggests. He speaks for the House or she. And that's never going to happen in our polarized system with strong parties. But I think some people do that better than others, take an institutional approach. I think one thing maybe we can kind of wind up talking about is, you know, I think that's a brilliant observation about Pelosi. And I think it leads to a bigger thing. You know, part of the theme of this is talking about individuals matter and who you pick to run your institutions matter. Pelosi was the daughter of a boss, basically. Baltimore boss. In Baltimore. Yeah. And people use boss as a pejorative, and sometimes it is, but I don't. Yeah, me neither. Thomas DeAlexandre. The answer's the coalition. Exactly. And that's what made Nancy Pelosi. I was very skeptical when she became the Democratic minority leader because she's this very, very, very liberal member from California, from San Francisco. I just thought she was going to get torn apart. And what I miss, and I think she is in the pantheon of great speakers. She learned from the family how to manage a coalition. And in the Democratic Party, that is very, very important. Like white progressives forget all the time that minority groups have different interests. There was this blow up in Texas we talked about where Colin Allred, well, it came right after our podcast, Colin Allred. I guess James Tallarico made some comment about Colin Allred either being mediocre or running a mediocre campaign. And Colin Allred just put him on blast and endorsed Jasmine Crockett and was like, keep my name out of your mouth. Like, don't you go call a black man mediocre, you know, and just like, you should watch it if you haven't listened to it. And white progressives were like, what are you doing? Like, we need to win the Senate seat. And I'm like, you know, yeah, Colin Allred is pretty liberal, but like, he's a black man. And there are there's all that stuff you talk about with lived experience. Like it's got a lot of truth to it. It does. And that gives him different interests sometimes than white progressives. And then that's what Pelosi was so brilliant. She really was Biden. Even Biden. Like it's it's it's the I kind of see Biden Pelosi as the apromole le deluge. Yeah. We've talked about that before in private. but we should maybe do something. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're right too, that like there's, if you just follow like Twitter or you're just reading the public conversation and you're just reading left, like let's say you're a progressive and you read like, I don't know, pick your progressive magazines, whatever, or progressive media source. The chances are very high that you within the democratic coalition, you are only getting a relatively small fraction of the entire argument, which it makes it different than the Republicans. Like if the Republicans, like if you take the neo-institutionalists like the Paul Ryan, the AEI wing, you take the Southern Christian conservative Mike Johnson wing, and then you got the Trumpy wing, you read the three of them, you can pretty much get a sense of where all the major players in the party are. But the Democratic Party you have, and this was Pelosi's great strength, was she took her base in California, which is its own political animal. She grafted onto it progressives, particularly stalwart, like longstanding progressives. And she had the confidence of the Congressional Black Caucus, which is remarkable. And she maintained their confidence through the entirety of her tenure. And I think as a general institutional thing, we'll see what SCOTUS does with the VRA. But one of the things that if they if they kill parts of the VRA, they're going to probably like decimate the congressional black caucus, which has been one of the most extraordinary political institutions of the last 50 years, to be honest. And one of the keys to Pelosi success was understanding how to interface with the CBC. And I think to your point, Sean, like how many how many, frankly, white progressives on Twitter were like smacking themselves on the head for what Cal Rico said. But it's like, man, you have like the intra party dissensions with or potential dissensions within the Democratic Party are something that have to be managed. And Pelosi was extraordinary. And she did all of this while allowing Obama to peacock, which was one of Obama's favorite things to do. And also she presented herself and frankly, I think, successfully leveraged the fact that she's a woman in the sort of celebrity that she acquired because to be the first female speaker into becoming a national democratic celebrity without creating a large base of enemies. It's just like if you look at her run from 2006 up until, I don't know, like 2020, it's extraordinary. Obama has this famous quote that I think explains so much of the Obama presidency for better and for worse, where he's getting ready to go give his speech at the two, the keynote address of the 2004 Democratic Convention. Someone asked him, hey, are you nervous? You think you're good? And he responds, I'm LeBron, baby. I got this. Yeah. You know, which. OK. Nancy Pelosi is LeBron. Like, I will give it up for her. She is. She was just a brilliant, brilliant politician. and a brilliant speaker. You don't have to like the policy she stood for or pushed, but like she is another example of how individuals matter. She just was she's LeBron. I would put her in the conversation for the goat. I would, too. I mean, I think like as as we get farther and farther away from the Obama era and this sort of like the celebrity culture that Obama had created ends up kind of just fading away. And so you start looking at the actual institutional players, Obama becomes less important and Pelosi becomes more important, I would say. Anyway, I think that'll do it for today's episode. Just want to remind everybody, Stubborn Things is a podcast of the American Enterprise Institute, and we'd like to thank the American Enterprise Institute for its support of this podcast. We'd also like to once again give a shout out to our producer, Michael Schwartz, who has been integral in helping us come up with ideas and then also gatekeeping us to make sure we don't go monologuing and talking too long and all of the stuff that Sean and I are instinctively inclined to do. So thank you, Michael. Absolutely. Absolutely. 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